C. Thomas McMillen, a former Maryland basketball standout and one of 17 University System of Maryland regents, said he had voted against the proposal and was “particularly opposed” to the process that led to the decision. The university had two days to decide whether to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference, of which it was a founding member, and a confi…

The proposed addition of Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten Conference, which remained up in the air late Sunday, would have implications well beyond the league. The move could prompt the Big 12 and other elite conferences to reopen expansion talks. And it increases the likelihood that the most powerful leagues will eventually have 16 institutions, several top athletics officials told The Chronicle.

Late Sunday, Wallace D. Loh, president of the University of Maryland at College Park, was expect…

Academic advisers were aware of bogus classes for athletes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And some tutors knew of lifted passages in papers that players were using to stay eligible for sports, the Raleigh News & Observer reported.

The latest revelations indicate that members of North Carolina’s academic-support unit for athletes used certain upper-level classes in the department of African and Afro-American studies to keep academically unprepared first-year football players …

Pat Forde put an interesting spin on the jewelry controversy involving Lance Thomas, a former Duke University basketball player, in his Yahoo! Sports column on Friday:

If there is anything even approximating a logical explanation for why a senior in college walked into a boutique jeweler on 47th Street in midtown Manhattan that caters to celebrities and professional athletes, and paid $30,000 up front for a black diamond necklace, a diamond-encrusted watch, a diamond cross, diamond earrings and …

Notre Dame announced on Wednesday that it planned to move to the Atlantic Coast Conference in all sports but football, shoring up the ACC and raising new questions about the Big East’s future.

The Irish—who will join the ACC as soon as they can exit the Big East, reports ESPN.com’s Brett McMurphy–follows five former Big East institutions that have left for the ACC in recent years: Boston College, Miami, Pitt, Syracuse, and Virginia Tech.

“North Carolina provides an immediate and intriguing test case for the expanded powers of Mark Emmert and the NCAA,” Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports writes. “Will he and the NCAA executive committee cowboy up again? Will they circumvent the rules manual and due process and go after Carolina on the basis of general principle, à la Penn State?”

The more we learn, the more it seems UNC has made a mockery of its ballyhooed academic mission for a long time in order to gain competitive advantage in footbal…

“Of the 38 courses the university says [Julius Nyang’oro] was responsible for over five summers, 26 of them listed a maximum capacity for just one student … University records show more than one student enrolled in most of these courses. And often, a substantial share of those students were athletes.”

Nyang’oro, the former chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies department where all of thos…

Maryland on Monday said it would eliminate seven sports in response to plummeting donor support and football ticket sales, the Washington Post reports. Men’s outdoor track and field, which it had planned to cut, survived thanks to the program’s fund-raising efforts.

Colleges change their athletic-conference affiliation for all sorts of reasons, but it’s mostly to make more TV money and move up the perceived ladder of prestige. It’s rare to hear anyone talk about the academic impact.

But switching leagues, it turns out, often enhances an institution’s ability to attract and retain high-quality students. Those are among the findings from a paper to be presented on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research.